O Silver Moon
by Alinyaalethia
Summary: 'All at once, far in the distance, I saw a long, silvery, glistening wave breaking over them' -it wasn't only the steps of Ingleside the waves broke over when war broke out. Set in Toronto and taking Rilla of Ingleside for it's source, here is an account of the Fords, of Ken, Persis, Leslie, Owen and those around them, during the years of the Great War.
1. By the Light of the Silvery Moon

_As ever, the characters are not mine but those of L.M. Montgomery. Those who are not hers belong by rights to Timothy Findley's book The__ Wars_ _and those who are neither, are, like the idea, all mine own._

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><p>There is a silver moon high in the heavens and ringed with a halo that means rain to the superstitious. Beneath the moon, under the yew trees, in the garden of the house on Sussex Avenue, Persis Ford is sitting, and because it is evening her hair is unwound. It is difficult to see in the dark, but in her hair Persis has taken after her mother, it is what her Aunt Anne would call 'living' hair', long and golden, the colour and fineness of the gold that Rumplestiltskin is said to have spun.<p>

Persis sees the halo around the moon, she must do, for her eyes are turned upwards towards the heavens, but she ascribes no purpose to it. If rain is coming, it is a long ways off; earlier in the day the cicadas were singing, a testament to the heat of the noontide. Now, in the moonlight, the crickets are chirruping, and not only the crickets but something more recognizably human too, emanating from the upstairs half of the house on the corner, the one next along, at the very junction of Huron and Sussex. It is Handel, and familiar, _endless pleasure endless love*_, drifting out of the window and far sweeter to listen to than the yew berries are to smell. _Semele enjoys above;_ yes if there is rain, it has not yet come.

It is with this melismatic musicality and in the glow of the moon that it proves possible to read the letter from Ken that brought her out into the garden to begin with. It came by the afternoon post, but then the cicadas were throbbing and by some miracle the house had contrived to be even more stifling than the back garden. Besides, as Persis could have told anyone who asked, Ken's letters invariably necessitate being read out of doors, full as they are of news of the Glen haunts that filled their summer holidays. Persis had put off the reading of this letter as pleasure to be deferred until the mugginess of the day had vanished and the light that fell through the yews was the gentler, witching beams of the moon. Now she delays the luxury of reading a little longer, and having listened to Handel's aria for soprano voice through once, calls over the garden boarder,

'Nina, are you wedded to that music this evening or can you be tempted away from it with the prospect of news from away?'

Abruptly the music breaks off, the uncompleted phrase winging its way to some heaven for abandoned melodies and the musical vision gives way to another more tangible as the singer appears at her window.

'Always,' she says, her voice sounding like a song even when speaking. This is Nina, an elfin creature with hair like rose-gold, who is seen to best effect when framed as now by her windowsill with its border of morning-glory flowers in the full flush of the moonlight.

Nina belongs to the time when for two years Persis and Ken had lived with her aunt rather than travel the world with their parents. Then, though Toronto, with its serpentine streets running through it like arteries had been hardly new to them, they had nonetheless been bonded to Nina by the shared experience of living away from one's nuclear family. It was a bond further solidified by the fact of Nina and Persis having attended the same collection of understated buildings at the corner of Bloor and Sherbourne, the chief of which was and continues to be 10 Elm Avenue. And though Leslie and Owen were now returned to Sussex Avenue and the Branksome Hall days have become a thing of history, and Ken and Persis have been reinstalled at the house on Sussex with its profusion of yews, their interest in Nina, and her music has not diminished.

'Is it a letter from Ken?' asks Nina in her treble sing-song, her golden head and then her body appearing on the window-ledge as she begins to descend the trellis that bolsters the morning-glories.

'What else?' says Persis, laughter tucked just inside the corners of her lips. The thing to understand about Nina is that she is that rarity who is not and never has fallen in love with Ken Ford, and he and his sister know as much. Persis watches Nina on the trellis and thinks that the other's acrobatics are in no ways restricted to the voice.

Could you sing like that, do you think?'

'Oh I expect so,' says Nina carelessly, jumping with fluidity onto the ground, 'I sang Undina** while dancing once when I is at school.'

As if to prove the plausibility of this, she rises up onto her toes and holding her arms horizontal to her body, begins to spin her way across the lawn to the border between the two houses singing, _songs my mother taught me_, that haunting gypsy melody of Dvorjak, _in the days long vanished_, leaping octaves effortlessly and neatly elluding a cluster of roses as she traverses the border and alights on the Fords' lawn. She stops as she settles herself beside Persis, tucking her knees under her chin and clasping her hands about her ankles.

'Auntie will be glad to have me out of the house,' Nina says as she settles, 'she has been hearing nothing but Handel, and the same Handel, for nearly an hour now. They are threatening me with Tatiana at the conservatory this term, and I hope they follow it up, because it will be good to have words I am at home with again after all this time. English is not a language meant to lie high in the voice. But you were telling me about Ken and Your Island.'

Always when Nina speaks of Prince Edward Island, Persis can see the capitals, 'Your Island,' as if there were no other island in the world. The laughter that has been threatening this last little while suddenly bursts forth, like a Rusalka rising from its lake, silvery as the moon and pealing like the St. James bells as they ring the changes._  
><em>

'Is that meant for me or the letter?' asks Nina, her eyes shining with reflected moonlight.

'Both,' says Persis, 'the combined notion that anyone could tire of your voice, I expect, and the fact that Ken always could write a good letter. Here, come nearer and take it to pieces with me.'

The noxious smell of the ripe yew berries notwithstanding the two girls stretch out under their branches and read over the news from Glen St. Mary. Defying all probability, Nina does manage to draw nearer her friend, and because she was combing her hair out as she sang, it like Persis's is loose, and it slips as she rests her chin on her elbow, mingling with that of her friend, so that rose-gold and honey are woven together in the moonlight.

The heat, Ken writes, has followed him to the Island and the sweetbriar had earlier in the day half choked them, rendering a gathering on the Ingleside lawn impossible. _Like the counter at Eatons, the one with all the scents, do you remember_, he has written.

'Do you remember?' asks Nina, sweeping her hair back over her shoulder and looking to Persis, whose face is flooded with moonlight and who is smiling at the memory Ken has evoked –those seemingly endless shopping excursions with mother near to Christmastime as children –not for nothing had she and Ken come to prefer the openness of the Toronto markets. That of course, is a memory linked to those years when Christmas had been spent at home, a thing which had not happened often in childhood –all those years travelling abroad for Owen Ford's books.

'Yes,' Persis says, 'I remember, though it seems ages ago. How we hated that counter. Let's go on, shall we? There's nearly enough for a short story at least, here, all this paper. I dread to think what the postage cost him.'

'Then don't think of it,' says Nina.

_It was the wrong afternoon to try for company, Ken had written, everyone is cross from the heat or pretty near to being, and up at the Manse one of Mrs. Meredith's pupils was merrily mangling 'A Scottish Soldier' –you know the one about being far from home or however it goes. 'These green hills are not my land's hills' –is that the refrain? I haven't your memory for music –to say nothing of Nina's – and never will have if I live three-score-years-and-ten. Anyway, whichever McAllister it was –or perhaps a Crawford? – playing, she was doing so jolly unevenly, in cut time rather than common time, I think Una said (that incidentally tells you everything you need to know about the sound of it –you know better than anyone how slow Una is to condemn anything –all those years being close to her)._

'Close' is hardly how Persis would describe the friendship Ken has touched on. She and Una share a tentative bond born of a long afternoon in each other's company quilting for a mission project so obscure that Persis has now forgotten its purpose. She remembers only that she made an effort to try and get to know Faith's quiet and unassuming sister, almost entirely for her own sake but not a little because Ethel Reese had been sitting opposite her trying to learn news of Ken.

According to Ken in this most recent letter, even Una had caught a little impatience off of the others, beating out the rhythm of the piece on a nearby stone in very careful common time, _so at least we heard it as it ought to have sounded_, Ken wrote.

_Jerry lost patience with the music altogether and demanded to know 'why in the name of all held sacred Rosemary couldn't have given the child something less apt?' You're frowning I know, but don't worry, that last is Jerry verbatim, not me being informal, honest. Jerry reckoned it was bad enough that politics should have gotten into the papers and his father's sermons without getting into the music Mrs. Meredith gave her pupils and I'm inclined to agree._

_I suppose you've had your share of political shop too, what with dad and his friends from the paper, and the house so near to Queens Park? Be an angel, will you and write to me one of your long, chatty letters about what they've been saying –maybe 'doing the voices' the way you used to do when we were kidlets? Now you are making a face, I know –you're sick to death of war talk and I haven't forgotten, not least because it may yet come to nothing. I hope to goodness you're right there –it will be infuriating if it should and this ankle keeps me out of it. If you can't run to writing about it and if it doesn't cost the earth, send The Globe on to me, won't you, or at least a section of it? I've not seen a copy in weeks and all the Glen paper is good for is an exercise in proofreading._

The garden of the Sussex Avenue house is suddenly resplendent with the sound of Nina's laughter in its treble splendour as it runs the gamut of the musical spectrum from Middle C to Top C to the C above that.

'You _are_ making a face,' she says to Persis when she had recovered sufficiently to speak.

'So were you not half a minute ago,' Persis protests. 'You're thinking that never mind the music, it is worse that politics should get into his letters to me, and I agree entirely. As for _The Globe_, he won't see a section of it until he's safely returned home –it _would_ cost the earth to send it and he ought to know as much. Besides, I don't believe he couldn't find a copy if he went looking.'

_Anyway, Faith tried to reason Jerry into sense and Nan said the music wasn't as bad as all that, but she must have said it out of contrariness because Persis, it was._

'Of course it was,' says Nina with a singer's indignity, 'how is it that song goes, _there is a soldier, A Scottish Soldier, Who soldiered far away, and wandered far away_? Of all the music to be persecuted by, it isn't even _good_ music.'

'It sounds all right when you sing it,' says Persis to tease her friend. Nina, singer of Undina, Semele, and perhaps of Tatiana in the near future, tosses her head elegantly, her hair rippling down her back like water. _I should hope so_, says that toss of the head, _when you and Auntie have been plagued only by Handel this last hour_. The effect is spoiled by the warmth that undercuts the elegance, she too is teasing.

'You,' Persis says, slipping her arm through Nina's, 'are by way of being one of the most musically snobbish creatures I have ever met, but you're lovely for all that. I'll write and tell Ken you take his side in all of this, shall I?'

'Yes do,' says Nina, who makes no effort to protest the implications of musical snobbery, 'what else does he say?'

''Rather a lot to judge from this,' says Persis, 'and the bulk of it about that folksong you've such a horror of –no don't pinch me, I'm on your side and his in this, it's gruesomely sentimental.'

_I thought of you and Nina and mother and wondered aloud why no one had told the pianist to think in two and not four, which was, of course, entirely the wrong thing to say._

'_I don't care if she thinks in one, two or ten,' said Jerry, dark as ever, 'just so long as it –oh there is a God after all –He has set me at liberty when I is in trouble.' It was a relief, I can tell you, to hear an end of it, and you remember how Jerry always has a piece of scripture tucked up his sleeve to suit the occasion._

_Jem grinned and demanded my opinion of the McAllister (Crawford?) playing because wasn't I from the 'Choral Capital of the Nation' or some such? I said 'Choral Capital of North America' as grandly as I could with a straight face (please write soon and say I got that right!) but wouldn't satisfy him as to an opinion. I'm spoiled by your playing and mother's and he knows it or he wouldn't have asked._

_Carl had it about right I think when he said 'to say that music is getting on your nerves, Jem, Jerry, you're making more noise the pair of you than it ever did.' The poor lad was nettled because they –or the music –had driven some pet specimen of his away. Didn't the girls jump when he said as much! I forget when I'm away from the Island that the Blythe and Meredith lasses haven't your tolerance for creepy things. All those long months living with black flies –I bet there are masses around the yews now, are there? And of course you can't kill a spider or the money goes out of a house, so you've always insisted._

Nina shudders impressively. 'I don't think I'd like to be crept up on by insects very much,' she says.' I don't even have the tolerance to put up with mosquitoes in the hot months.'

'Does anyone?' says Persis, tugging impulsively at a strand of Nina's hair as she says it.

'Well, you've never minded them much,' says Nina, and she ducks for self-preservation further into the shadow of the yew trees. As she does so she seems to absorb the halo of the moon so that her hair, warm and golden, though not so long as Persis's, shimmers like starlight under its silvery beams.

'They don't bite me enough to make me mind,' Persis says, looking up from the letter and at the heavens where a handful of bats are threading their way between the scintillating warp of the summer triangle. 'It's mother they go after. Uncle Gil says it's something to do with blood-type, but he may well have made that up to stop me pestering him with questions –I was forever coming up with new ones for him. Besides, you wouldn't notice insects either if you had Ken for a brother and a handful of holidays in North Ontario –you can't go there and _not_ learn to live with black flies. But I have about as much relish as you,' adds Persis meditatively, 'for the thought of some 'creepy thing' crawling up my ankles at no notice.'

After that, Ken writes, they all retreated to the shelter of the spare room that he and Persis had shared as children on protracted visits to Ingleside to escape the the trauma of the out-of-time music because there it had not been 'sun drenched and stifling.'

'That has a wonderful sound to it,' says Nina, even as Persis read it, 'you could sing a line like that.'

'I thought you said English isn't meant to lie high in the voice?'

'I did, but I didn't say it couldn't be sung at all. Give it to someone like you, who can sing out of the base of the earth, all those low ledger lines I haven't got.'

Persis shakes her head. 'I haven't got them either, I just haven't got your top notes. I might stretch to that song that nettled Jerry, how did it go, _there was a soldier, a Scottish soldier_…'

'_Don't_,' says Nina emphatically, swatting Persis with hands that easily stretch over an octave on the piano.

'What did I tell you?' says Persis, 'no top notes, and no middle register, though I think I can say with security my playing makes up for it. I can't begin to think how you could go wrong with a song like the one the McAllister –'

'Crawford, I thought,' interjects Nina, a question in her voice.

'One of them anyway, was playing. Now if he'd said the child was struggling over Minuet in G …'

'Anyone can play that one if they put in the time,' says Nina, and Persis gives up. They agree over the humming of the crickets that if Ken never writes more than the odd letter to his sister the world will be cheated of something good.

_Love as ever to all at home, Ken finishes, I'd say give my best to Nina, but if I know you, she's reading alongside you, so I'll just say tell the Rosses hullo from me and be sure to say to little Stuart I haven't forgotten the outing I promised him to Hanlan's Point._

Persis begins to fold the letter up and Nina to sit upright again when they are stopped by the implausible postcript Ken has affixed and the moonlight catches. It runs,

_P.S. I ought to have said before, there is to be a dance at the Harbour light and I've let them talk me into going –it stopped me thinking of the Scottish soldier and his green hills anyway, and gave us something pleasant to talk of._

'He's mad,' says Persis to Nina and the yew trees, 'to be thinking of trying to dance on that ankle.'

'But of course he'll go,' says Nina, shaking her head at the ridiculousness of the idea, 'No one is ever to tell me again that it is only sopranos who preen; he's acting just like a peacock wanting to show off its lovely feathers come what may. Don't you _dare_ write that into your answer.'

'I'll take out the bit about the sopranos and say it comes from me' says Persis, 'it might as well. Really, he's quite mad,' and so saying, she folds the letter in thirds and puts it by, meaning to take it into the house and leave it where her mother can find it at some later date. Then she grimaces and reflects that just because Ken is well shot of that awful and sentimental folksong does not mean he has not left her with an earworm for the rest of the evening, such as it is, and it runs _there is a soldier, a Scottish soldier, who soldiered far away, and wandered far away…_

'Sing something Nina, won't you?' she asks.

Not for nothing has Nina won herself a place at the Royal Conservatory of Music, she is a singer to her innermost core, and singing is instinctive with her as breathing. Lying stretched lengthwise on the lawn of the Sussex Avenue house she turns over onto her back, presses her shoulders against the grass and looking up at the stars sings of the bliss of Semele again; the Scottish Soldier is forgotten, Zeus's thunderbolts are rendered useless, his lightening safeguarded to the moonstruck-blue eyes of the singer as pleasure and love run on without end and Handel again takes precedence.

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><p>* an aria from Handel's <em>Semele<em>, and sung by the eponymous heroine, it tells of the happiness of Semele and Zeus before the intervention of Juno.

**Undina, and later Tatiana also, are both heroines in operas by Tchaikovsky. _Undina_ is an obscure three-act opera about a mermaid, but Tatiana is by far the better known of the two, as the letter-writing heroine from _Eugene Onegin. _


	2. So We Will Sing Together

**Thank you for such warm reviews -especially those of you I can't thank more directly. It's always a bit nerve-wracking starting something new.**

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><p>The evening of the dance at the Harbour light finds Persis again in the garden, at the sunset hour when the cicadas are giving way to the gentle sighing of the crickets. She and her mother have often tried to catch the exact moment at which this changeover occurs but have never yet succeeded. Tonight they miss it again; Leslie because she has gone out to Massey hall to hear the opera, and Persis because she is caught up unravelling the shorthand her father invented years ago and uses to sketch out the plots of his novels. Not for the first time it occurs to Persis that her father would have far less trouble reading his own manuscripts if he would do as other mere mortals and swap self-invented shorthand for handwriting. The great Owen Ford, however, has never been that, and in the orange glow of the sunset, Persis sits in the shelter of the yews debating whether it is 'missionaries' or 'memories' her father is writing about and sending to India. The sun stretches and shrinks, until it is only a glowing pinprick in a pink pincushion of sky. In its fading light she decides it must, for the sake or her sanity as scribe, be 'missionaries' after all, because how could memories travel to India or anywhere else and having so decided, the manuscript begins at last to make sense.<p>

Except for the crickets, the evening is a quiet one. Nina is not singing from the next-door window; she has been called away to rehearse a concert to be held round the corner in St. Thomas's church on Huron featuring excerpts from Donizetti's _La Fille du Régiment_. She has promised to be back in time for cocoa with an account of the rehearsal but in the meantime there is only the manuscript in hand for company. Unaccompanied as it is by Nina's musical patter or even her perpetual singing, the voice of Owen Ford shines through on the page undiluted and evokes not only the writer but also his son. For a moment even the crickets hush and time runs backwards so that Persis is again a child pouring over her father's shorthand on the floor of his study while Ken experiments with a manual stencil. The memory of the stencil gives way to the more recent one of Ken's letter of the other day and Persis recollects his talk of dancing and folksongs cloying in their sentimentality. It is by this circuitous route that _there was a soldier, a Scottish soldier,_ finds its way to her lips. It is displaced suddenly, and gladly, when from somewhere close at hand comes the sound of a rather flat though jaunty voice singing; '_sing with me, I'll sing with you, and so we will sing together…_'*

It is not nearly good enough for Nina, or even one of her friends, and besides, it is still too early to expect her back. This is the voice of a young boy wavering precariously on the edge of musical maturity. Recognising the voice as that of 'little' Stuart Ross, now all of eleven and growing like a weed, Persis dutifully joins in; '_sing with me I'll sing with you_,' canonically and at a slight descant, '_so we will sing together/, so we will sing together,/ so we will sing together,' _and on to the chorus, which he sings with great gusto and she with slightly more restraint.

' _For we are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria, Pretoria /We are marching to Pretoria, Pretoria hurray!'_ and Stuart gives an almighty shout on the last _hurray!_ as he comes sailing into view on his older brother's bicycle.

He is flushed with the effort of singing and cycling, and his cheeks are rosy as any yew-berry has a right to be as he comes into view over the low fence, leaping off of the bicycle on seeing Persis and talking and walking towards her as excitably as he can be expected to be when hampered by the too-big bicycle, for growing or not, he is still not half big enough to be riding it. Almost as tall as the boy himself, it looks either like a stunted and awkward horse or else an overgrown and unwieldy dog to the uninitiated.

'Have you heard, have you heard,' he calls out, daring to let go of the bicycle with one hand so that it veers dangerously, and waving madly at her, 'have you heard?'

'Have I heard what? And what are you doing so many miles from home, Stuart?' Properly the boy lives in Rosedale, tucked into a neat corner of South Drive, or he should do. To see him out at this late hour, even in summer, so far from home, and moreover, without an older sibling in sight, is disconcerting to Persis.

'Oh no one will mind about _that_,' says Stuart impatiently '–mum won't even notice.' Likely Mrs. Ross will not notice either.

'But Peggy, Stuart, your sister, does she know? Or Robert?' The last seems most plausible; it is after all his brother's bicycle that Stuart is out riding. Stuart doesn't answer because he is preoccupied with the bicycle. He props it against the fence and then, balancing on it awkwardly, brings himself up onto the fence itself and sits there the better to talk to Persis. It isn't comfortable; it catches him in the crease where his legs meet his torso and cuts through the linen of his trousers to his skin. Do the people at South Drive know, Persis asks again, and Stuart rubs the back of his neck thoughtfully

'Well,' Stuart says, still rubbing at his neck, 'that is, I did mention to mum I was going out –only to Trinity you know –'

'Then how do you come to be _here_?' Persis demands of him, because much as she is fond of this impish child, now badly beating a tattoo against the fence with his ankles, she cannot understand how he has got it into his curly-haired head that Sussex Avenue will take him promptly home from Trinity College.

'Yes, well, I was getting to that,' says Stuart. 'We couldn't get in at Trinity –'

'You and who else –and what do you mean you couldn't get in?' Were he there, Ken would no doubt tell her she was doing an admirable job of playing the High Inquisitor.

'Well, the porter was wanting to shut the gates,' says Stuart regretfully.

'I don't wonder, you must have come up well after dinner, did you? I thought you must, now who and what brought you here?'

'A friend from school, or he used to be until his mum took him out of mine and put him into the university school –anyway, when we couldn't get in at Trinity we thought we'd try Knox, because of the park, but we couldn't get in there either –we were wanting to climb the trees, so we came back to his house, on Huron you see…'

'Gracious, you've been wandering all over this evening,' says the still unseeing Persis. Stuart grins and runs a hand through his fair hair, so that if it is possible, it becomes untidier than it was a moment before.

' I s'pose I have been a bit. Mum won't mind though, she never does –I'm not sure she took it in about me going out –and Robert's sitting in with Rowena.'

'I don't suppose you passed the church?' asks Persis, managing to break into what is shaping itself into one of Stuart's stream-of-conscious narratives.

'Ye-es. At least I think so, if it was the church that was making music you could hear blocks away.' He pauses to whistle a snatch of something that sounds like _Ah! mes amis_.** Then his purpose for visiting comes rushing back to him and he stops whistling, and his chest puffs like a pigeon as he takes a breath and bursts out 'but _have you heard_?'

Stuart is again possessed of that boyish, nervous energy that was coursing through him when he first called out in greeting. He resumes whistling, swapping Donizetti for _Pretoria_.

_Sing with me I'll sing with you…_

'Stuart, all I've heard this evening is your talk of gadding about Toronto and those crickets –listen. Come down off that fence and tell me properly, then we can put a call through to your mum, or Peggy, or someone, and let them know where you've got to. They must be wondering by now.'

'Oh all right,' says Stuart with feigned reluctance. He hops down off the fence, wreaking mass destruction on a row of mingled columbine and cornflowers, and proclaims with all the pomp and authority eleven can muster, 'England's declared war on Germany.'

'Tell me again,' says Persis, abandoning her father's manuscript and looking unbelievingly at the roguish and red-cheeked lad before her. It is as if he has grown up in front of her.

'They've gone to war,' he says again, 'they've gone to war, and that means we'll go too, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' says Persis abstractedly, for she is thinking of Ken and trying to reckon when his ankle will be mended against how long this war Britain has gone into –and so Canada by extension – is likely to last. From this she is recalled by the trilling the sound of their 'phone, shrilling out their ring, and motioning to him that he should come with her, she goes in to answer it.

'Yes I know,' she is saying into it and to her mother as Stuart appears in the kitchen. 'Stuart's just said.' Stuart is nearly bursting with pride that his role in all of this is so central.

'Yes, no, Ross, Stuart Ross, you remember, from South Drive.'

Leslie does remember; the Rosses were, with the exception of Nina, the one family whose children Ken and Persis had made the effort to keep up with. The older brother, the one whose bicycle Stuart is out on, Robert, was in school with Ken, just as Peggy had been in Persis's year at Branksome Hall, and because South Drive was only a little ways from the school, Persis had spent many afternoons in that uncomfortably grand house, only really growing close to little Stuart, who in those days was a mere nine years old and desperate for the attention his family was far from lavishing on him. She had gone walking with him in the ravine and stood with him watching the trains come in over Summerhill Avenue. She showed him the best ways to capture ladybirds and spotted for him while he climbed high into the crowns of trees. These things had garnered favour with Robert of the Bicycle and Peggy of French House+ days, so that although Branksome is no longer a feature in Persis's life, the connection to the Rosses has not diminished.

Leslie knows as much but is obviously as perplexed as Persis at the sudden appearance of the Rosses' littlest boy at this advanced hour of night time, because she is saying now from the telephone nook of Massey Hall, where she and Owen had gone to hear _Serse_ put on in English, 'but South Drive's in Rosedale –miles away, Persis.'

'Yes, I know,' says Persis with a supreme effort at patience, and supposing her mother must have been caught even more unawares than herself, ambushed by this news of the war in the middle of an _opera seria_.

'I know it is mum, I've just been asking him how –no I don't, he hasn't said. Something about cycling 'round the colleges. Trinity and Knox and I don't know where else. You know what it's like getting a straight answer from a boy his age, surely? You brought up Ken.'

There is laughter the other end of the 'phone and Persis nods with relief; it is good to stem the Maternal Inquisition in full flow, especially when the world is rising up in war, especially when her mother has sounded so nervous minutes before.

'Look,' Persis says now, 'I was going to ring Mrs. Ross and say that Stuart's with us. I don't suppose it matters overmuch now –'

'You will see that he stays over won't you?' says Leslie, 'I mean, you won't send him cycling back across the city, along Younge in the dark?'

'Yes, I will, yes,' then to clarify and stop her mother's anxiety, 'stay the night with us I mean. Really, what must have possessed you to think I'd send him along one of the busiest streets in the city at –' Persis strains her neck to peer at the clock.

'Anyway, you needn't worry about Stuart,' she says when she fails to make out the time, 'he's here and he's making a spectacular face, no doubt thinks he's perfectly capable of getting home –no I _won't_, are you staying through the interval? All right, I'll leave the door unlocked,' and she rings off.

'Now,' says Persis, turning to Stuart, whose eyes are gleaming with adventure, 'I am going to make a room up for you, no don't protest, I am, and you are going to be the dear, loveable boy I know you can be and not the imp you're inclined to be, and run round to Nina and her Aunt Myra –you remember Nina, she will be home now –and you are going to tell them what's happened, because I shouldn't think they've heard, and tell them too that they are to come round. Then you will telephone South Drive, and I will put cocoa on, how does that sound?'

Stuart arches his back with the importance of being able to play messenger not only once but twice in the same evening. He raises his hand in mock salute to her and is out of the house like a shot, whistling as he goes _sing with me I'll sing with you_, and leaving Persis with the conviction that she has never met, and never will meet, another lad with even half the energy of Stuart Ross.

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><p>*An old song sung by the men in the Boer War that as Pete Seeger and the Weavers assure me, is good 'whether or not you are marching to or from Pretoria.'<p>

**'Ah! Mes Amis' is the tenor Aria from _La Fille du Régiment_ famous for its nine High C's.

+It is probably worth clarifying that though the school I've sent Persis, Nina and others to goes by one name, the buildings that make it up tend to go by others. Thus French House is (and still is) annexed to the 10 Elm Ave school.


	3. One Fine Day

**Thank you again for such lovely reviews -especially those of you I haven't been able to thank more directly. To everyone who asked for more of Stuart Ross, I certainly do mean to bring him back. For the time being though, the focus is elsewhere...**

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><p>It is late in the evening, and <em>Un Bel Di<em> as sung by Nina can be heard along Sussex Avenue and is filling the front room of the Ford's house, where Persis sits drawing in pen and ink. Over the sound of Nina's music comes a clattering at the front door and the sound of some inexpert person battling with the latch, forgetting or else not knowing that the long Alice-key worthy of something out of Carroll needs to be turned to the right for the door to give. It is the sort of thing her father might do, Persis thinks. If she didn't know to a certainty that he was even now upstairs writing madly about missionaries in India she would suppose he was trying to get in. Failing that it can only be…must be…and pushing lap desk and drawing from her, so that the ink bottle wavers precariously on it's perch, Persis is running to the door, saying through it as she does so, 'Ken –but you're meant to stay the month out with Cousin Nettie. You must have been travelling practically all night –you never caught the sleeper from Charlottetown?'

More than that she cannot manage, because bad ankle or no the dark-haired lad on the doorstep has engulfed her in a crushing bear hug and is saying, 'oi! Is that any way to great a favourite brother come home early on purpose to surprise you? Tell me you've missed me, Butterfly.'

'If –you –will –let –me –breathe,' says Persis into his shoulder, torn between laughter and a wish to push him away for the sake of her ribs, which he is quite efficiently crushing.

'Sorry,' Ken says ruefully but without betraying the least inclination to let her go, 'it's only that it's such bliss to be back again after the journey I've had…I can't begin to tell you…'

'You don't have to, don't you remember I took the sleeper with you once? It was coming back from Christmas at Ingleside the first year we boarded with Nina's aunt.'

'Gosh, so you did –but I wasn't thinking, I'm still taking in being home. It couldn't very well be anyone else. Do you know, since leaving Union I've been positively persecuted by mosquitoes? And here I was thinking the season for them over. How is it you've managed to be clean and fresh as ever –what is it you're wearing? Hyacinths and yew berries –I'd know you anywhere for the smell of both. What will I do the day you stop wearing hyacinth scent? I shan't know you if you do, promise you won't.' Ken has by now turned the topic over so many times that it is all Persis can do not to be overcome with dizziness trying to keep up. It is this, more than anything that causes her to fall to teasing him, not five minutes after his return.

'Ken, you've gone soft, all that time on the Island. For goodness sake come in out of the doorway and stop talking nonsense.'

'I'm not, they're tied up in my mind with you, hyacinth blooms. No don't push, I know you're longing to get away but you have no idea what Heaven it is to just be still after that train. I was standing the whole way, you know, and every time it shuddered to a stop I was jolted about horribly.' If this is meant to elicit sympathy from Persis, it is an effort that falls rather short.

'You _idiot_ boy,' she says almost severely, 'I can't see how that ankle of yours is supposed to get better if you're bent on doing madcap things like dancing and standing on trains while it's recovering.' She means it as a scolding but is too pleased at having him home again for it to be a very effective one. Ken groans anyway.

'If I never hear another word about my ankle, Butterfly, it will be too soon.'

'I know,' Persis says, grinning at him and contriving at last to duck out of his arms, trying as she does so to take his case from him.

'But you earned that one Ken, you really did. It's going to get worse before it gets better, that ankle, if you're going to go gadding about in such a way as to put Stuart Ross to shame.'

'No you don't,' says Ken, taking hold of the case, 'I'm not such an invalid as that. You can cluck all you like just as soon as I'm inside. But what's Stuart Ross got to do with it?'

'He came up the other evening on Robert's bicycle –'

'Crikey! Has he grown as much as that? Have I told you yet, Butterfly, how I've missed this?'

'You have and he hasn't, not a bit of it,' says Persis as Ken threads his unencumbered arm through hers and leans heavily upon it.

'That bicycle of Robert's is still inches too big for little Stuart. Mind you, he is growing –are you sure you're managing?'

'Perfectly,' says Ken with a grunt, setting the case down with a thud by the umbrella stand in the hall. He does not, Persis can't help noticing, relinquish her arm with the case.

'What would Uncle Gil say to see you like this?' Persis demands of him as they begin to walk towards the kitchen.

'He'd recommend coffee and a good natter. Come on, Cousin Nettie's brew didn't count for much. She _would_ insist on making it from practically powder. Who all's at home? Nina's clearly next door, I could hear her singing as I came up the walk. You don't wonder to hear her, do you, how the Royal Conservatory agreed to take her on. What will she do to me, do you reckon, if I tell her that song suits her?'

'She may very well agree with you –it _does_ suit her and she's never been coy about her music. Equally she might throw something at you for having the nerve to comment at all.'

'I was afraid you'd say that last thing,' says Ken, 'it strikes me as altogether the more plausible of the two scenarios.'

'You aren't really telling me,' Persis says, ' that you find Nina's logic so very unreasonable? She's watched you breaking the hearts of half the girls in college, and Elm Avenue before that, at least as often as I have, and you are surprised she should take the majority of what you say with a sizeable pinch of salt?'

'Yes well,' says Ken, who could see no very successful way of besting his sister in this argument, 'that's Nina accounted for then. Where are the others?'

'Dad's upstairs writing…'

'…and not to be disturbed, I take it, finishes Ken for her. It was a trick of theirs, they are not twins but not having as the Ingleside children had, choice in confidants, there is little of each other's thought patterns they do not know.

'Something like that,' says Persis, rising on point to drop a kiss on his cheek.

'Goodness I'd not realised how _much _I'd missed you,' she says as she does so.

'Well it took you long enough to come out with it,' Ken says, affecting to sound wholly unimpressed and tugging her earlobe gently. 'I was beginning to wonder. So dad's writing –shorthand clearly because when I looked in at the window you were drawing and dreaming rather than playing at cryptographer for him –'

'Kenneth Ford, you are a terror.'

'So you often tell me. It's quite true though and I forgive you. Let me guess, it's still the book about the drippy missionary with more religious zeal than can be healthy…'

'I wouldn't put it quite like that…'

'No, but I would and do –and you are –or you were until I came in, dreaming of Japan.'

'That,' says Persis as she installs her brother at the kitchen table, 'was a lucky guess on your part.'

'Not at all, says Ken as one grievously hurt, to say nothing of enduring a throbbing ankle, 'it's your opera, this one, it always has been. You're called for it, don't you know. And even if you weren't you invariably _are_ dreaming of Japan when you listen to it. What were you drawing? Cranes? Water-lilies?'

'Stuart Ross on that bicycle,' says Persis, scrabbling in the cupboard for the coffee-grinder, 'you should have seen him, Ken.'

'I wish I had. What was he doing up this way anyway?'

'I have been asked that more times since war broke out than you have been about that ankle and that I will swear to,' Persis says, re-emerging with the coffee-grinder in one hand and a tin of coffee grounds in the other.

'By his account he was going about tree-climbing in the colleges after dinner.'

'Oh to be eleven again and bright-eyed as Stuart Ross,' interjects Ken, stretching out luxuriantly at the table and revelling in the smell of the coffee his sister is making up. He remembers the scent of the yew berries in her hair and wonders if it is indicative of yew berry tarts but does not quite dare to ask.

'Ye-es,' says Persis thoughtfully, 'eleven again would be nice, but only if I could have it over again with you and mother and dad –Nina too, naturally, if it were possible. I wouldn't wish Mrs. Ross on anyone.'

'No,' agrees Ken, 'nor would I…which reminds me, where _has_ mum got to?'

'It's her Ladies' Aid night, Wednesdays always are, you know that.'

'I forgot. It's what comes of all that sea air, by which I mean being away all that time. Do I take it you didn't fancy going along?'

'I pleaded a headache,' says Persis as the coffee in the bodum declares itself ready.

Ken grunts and says, 'whatever do you suppose women did before headaches were invented?*'

'Be careful,' says Persis warningly, retracting the cup she has almost offered him, 'or I shall be telling you that so long as lads in the mode of you, Jem and Robert have been about, so have headaches.'

'Life would be dull without me, you know it would,' Ken says, rousing himself enough to dive for the coffee cup his sister has retracted.

'And I notice Stuart gets off lightly,' he says when he misses the cup by inches, 'I begin to feel displaced.'

'What, by an impish boy of eleven with eyes that flash? Ken, he displaced you _years_ ago for being dear and motherable.' All the same, she yields him his cup and comes to sit opposite him at the table.

'It hasn't stopped you trying, I notice,' says Ken, accepting the offering of coffee and adding cream to it liberally, 'and speaking of if mothers, if ours is out, is it safe to…'

'To talk about the war? Oh for goodness sake don't tell me that on top of all your other nonsense you've taken a notion that mother's buried her head in the sand about it? What do you think the Ladies' Aid was meeting over that gave me a headache and set me wishing life were simple again?'

'Hence Butterfly and Japan?' queries Ken, 'and Stuart Ross on his bicycle –Robert's bicycle I mean?'

'Well partly,' says Persis, 'I haven't the least control of what Nina sings, it's a fluke she went in for _Butterfly_ this particular evening. I think it's her way of dreaming away tonight too.' Persis looks so wistful as she said it that in spite of wishing he could vent his own frustrations to her –Jerry and Jem's enthusiasm, his dratted ankle- Ken puts them aside with his empty coffee cup.

'Come on then Butterfly,' he says, 'I never did tell you about that dance and I promised I would.'

'I still think you were mad to go,' says Persis.

'Of course you do,' says Ken, 'I expected nothing less.'

The westernized strains of _Un Bel Di_ fade away as Ken and Persis regain the front room. By no stretch of credulity is it the most private place to talk –either of their rooms would be better for that –but it is the best room to anticipate arrivals; if they sit closeted upstairs on the yellow water-lilies quilt in Persis's room it is entirely too probable that their exchange of confidences will be surprised by the golden greeting of their mother, the exuberant shout of their father, pleased as Persis at having Ken back. It is far better to sit in the exposed front room with its view of Sussex Avenue and watch, if not listen, for the crunch of the new auto against the gravel in the drive, the Alice-key missing its mark as mother realises belatedly that the door is open.

Persis comes and kneeling at her brother's feet, she tilts her head up so as to see him better and says, 'now tell me about this dance, what they played who stood up with who –you won't have done if you've the sense of geese but there's no guaranteeing that you had.'

Out in the garden the crickets hum, and under the window a robin's voice swells and throbs. In the house next door rise up again the strains of _Un Bel Di Vedremo_, as Nina recommences her practice. Her opening top G glistens in the air and over the sound of it, Kenneth Ford talks easily to his sister about the Chinese lanterns that decorated the lighthouse, the ring around the moon the evening of August fourth, the names of the dances Ned Burr played and his father called the steps to. Embedded in all of this is the fact of his having shared Pride of Erin Waltz with little Rilla that evening at the Harbour Light. They have never been in the habit of keeping secrets from one another and there are none now. Ken tells his sister of the charmed hour on the sandbar and Persis, listening, does not once mention his ankle or how terribly he used to tease the youngest of the Blythe clan. When he has finished they sit in almost-reverent silence, the only sound that of Nina's voice ascending again to the G at the top of the staff.

Ken is on the point of asking after her, how the summer has passed at Sussex Avenue, saying perhaps, 'where were you when war was declared?' but at that moment his ear latches onto the sound of an interruption in the direction of the garden. Undercutting the swell of the Puccini as Nina turns top G into High B flat is the faint munching tread of car-wheels on the gravel walk.

Persis hears it too, she says, 'there's the car coming back. For goodness' sake talk of something sensible, won't you? It will never do if mother comes in to find you've taken to plotting love-affairs.'

That is why, when Leslie comes into the house, it is to the sound of Ken regaling Persis with the latest misadventures of Doctor-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde.

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><p>* From <em>Rainbow Valley<em>, if I'm right, the sentiment was Ellen West's long before it was Kenneth Ford's.


	4. Let Me Die But First

**With gratitude, as always, for your reviews. I love knowing what you make of this story. **

**A note on the chapter title; I have not, and have no plans to kill any of the characters off. The title is drawn from the opening of what is often called 'Tatyana's Letter Scene' in _Onegin,_ for reasons that should, I hope, become ****apparent...**

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><p>I<em> must tell you, though it's a terrible thing to put in writing, all summer, Anne, I have harrowed myself with the thought of what it would mean if Ken's ankle healed badly; now I am dreading the day it is whole again and he goes off to join little Jem and Jerry Meredith and all the others. I know he'll go, already he is grousing about his ankle putting him off and of all the wicked things to be I am <em>_glad__. I expect I'll be glad and proud and half a dozen other things when it is his turn, but just this moment I am selfishly grateful because he will be home that much longer._

Sitting at the writing desk in the front room of the Sussex Avenue house, Leslie Ford steeples her fingers beneath her chin and dithers over sending the letter before her. But she has never been anything but honest with Anne, and now, when the world is tumbling to great destructive pieces, hardly feels the moment to begin being otherwise. Besides, she cannot shake the feeling Anne will understand what she means, and understand the sentiment lying in between the curlicued Victorian lines of handwriting on the letter-paper stamped with the university's letterhead. All the same, she appends as an afterthought,

_Now write with cheerful news, for I don't believe Ingleside is without some measure of cheerfulness even now, and for the love of good things, scold me soundly and tell me I'm being a goose while you're about it._

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><p><em>I only whish I <em>_could__ scold you. _Writes Anne_._ She is sitting on the Ingleside Veranda and from somewhere far-away come to her the echoes of her children as they were in Rainbow Valley days, Jem's war-whoop, Walter's whistle and the twin's laughter. Then the wind changes and there is only the rustling of the letter paper balanced on her knee and made stiff enough to write on by the cover of her well-loved Tennyson underneath it.

_ Leslie, when I sent Little Jem off on that train I was picturing him as he was the day we put him into short trousers and I told myself I'd had my cry __then__, at the House of Dreams, and I mustn't have it over again. Besides, Jem sees it all as one extended lark, I know he does, so I made believe he was only Little Jem again on one of his adventures and almost joined in the spirit of the thing. But when the train had pulled away and I had waved him out of sight –oh I wanted nothing so much as to throw back my head and howl right along with Dog Monday. I didn't –the others never would have coped if I had –but how I wished I __could__. _

_Somehow though, I feel in my bones that had it been Walter I couldn't have done so much. I just about managed with Jem because he's always been fighting battles of one sort or another –but Walter! The only fight he ever went into was against Dan Reese and no one but me saw the look on his face when it came home to him what he had done. __I was putting him to bed and he suddenly broke down halfway through his prayers and said 'do you think God will want to hurt me as badly as I hurt Dan Reese to show me I've done a not good thing, mother?' It didn't matter that I rushed to reassure him, he woke up sobbing from a nightmare in which he was hounded by hammer-wielding tigers later that night and every night after that for a week. And they're coming after him now, Leslie, I feel sure they are. The look in his eyes at the station today, it was just the same as it was when he woke up from those night-terrors, and they're going to keep haunting him until he's well enough to go –I know they are. I don't know how I know, but I do._

_And if Walter goes –I am frightened of what will happen if Walter goes. When he was a very little boy I came in to give him a kiss goodnight and saw the moon had cast the shadow of the window crossbar full on his little face. Leslie, it looked so like a cross I got gooseflesh all over, even to my soul, if souls have gooseflesh. Mine did that evening anyway. But I kissed him asleep and never thought of it until he was dying of typhoid fever and it loomed up like an omen to haunt me. My little boy with a cross stretched across his face in the moonlight. I was convinced it meant that fever would take him away from me. But he got over the fever and so I can't help a little moth in my soul that is gnawing at my peace of mind whispering that if Walter goes to war too –but I won't write it –if I write it down it shall become real. _

_So you see, it isn't you whose feeling misplaced relief –because as long as he's not yet got over the typhoid I can keep him near a little longer. But I can't have it that way always -I don't suppose I would want to if I could. Just now though, I can't think of that. It will harrow my soul as you so aptly put it, more than enough when it becomes a reality to be lived through and not a far off tomorrow. Do me a favour Leslie, won't you, and tell me I'm being silly and superstitious and spending altogether too much time with Gertrude Oliver, with all my talk of crosses and night terrors. Gilbert is away in Harbour Head delivering a baby for Hetta Eliot or he would do, and I am sure I shall go mad left to my thoughts._

_It occurs to me I've never given you the cheerful news you asked for. Forgive me, look for it in the next letter, won't you? _

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><p><em>Never mind,<em> writes Leslie in answer, _good news is at a bit of a premium at the moment._ _Sussex Avenue is positively alive with nerves. We are starting every time there's a sound remotely like the latch coming free in case it is Owen or a friend of his with war news. Nina of next door sometimes gets some in her letters from her family –but those are few and far between at the moment. All Owen will say is that the book shall never be done. He's disgruntled because he's been coerced into helping with the paper. He always could lay typeset better than anyone and faster –except perhaps Ken –and the paper simply won't stop. _

In the front room of the Sussex Avenue house, Leslie Ford pauses in her writing, smiling at the recollection of how black Ken's hands used to turn from playing with the typeset and frames in his father's office in the days when Owen Ford wrote consistently for _The Globe_. A glance out the window suggests to his mother that he is at that moment turning them not black so much as green, engaged as he is at that moment in waging a war against the dandelions buried deep in the grass. It is his sister's hands that will be black, Leslie thinks, for Persis, having relocated the lap-desk to the front garden, appears to be rendering the scene in charcoal, Ken, garden and dandelions inclusive. They are waiting on the afternoon post, she knows they are; it feels as if the inhabitants of the Sussex Avenue house have done nothing but wait on the post and the paper since war was declared.

Presently there is a shout and Ken sits up properly, his voice ringing out across the avenue and reaching his mother in the front room, 'Stuart! Nina!'

Sure enough, as Leslie watches screened by the paisley curtains, Nina comes into view on the arm of little Stuart Ross, who only looks taller than usual because Nina's slight stature belies the voice she possesses. Stuart is bursting with news; Leslie can see that. He throws his shoulders back in imitation of a soldier's posture, determined to at least look adult, but at the last moment his eleven years betray him and he breaks from Nina, and half-running half-tumbling across the lawn lets out a war whoop that turns belatedly into the triumphal shout, 'they have not taken Paris!'

That Nina already knows Leslie can tell; the girl's eyes are shining to rival Stuart's, though unlike his, Nina's are touched with tears.

'Isn't it wonderful?' she is saying to Persis, 'isn't it wonderful?' Leslie does not hear her child's answer; she is too busy trying to process this wonderful piece of news as prised from the jubilant lips of Stuart Ross.

Even if she were not, whatever Persis says is lost to her mother over the yelp Stuart emits as he is pulled fiercely into a hug, Persis having abandoned lap desk and drawing expressly for this purpose. When she releases him the back of his neck is black from the charcoal on her hands but he is too giddy over the news of the victory of the Marne to notice. Besides, Leslie thinks, smothering a laugh, when have eleven-year-old boys ever been concerned with neatness? An impromptu game of what Leslie takes for a variant of Tig in which only Stuart is not 'It' springs up. The girls chase Stuart across the lawn, and for the first time in what must be months the sound of Nina's high glissandi and Persis's silvery laughter can be heard drifting in through the window. Not quite swallowed by the sound of it is Stuart's childish and gleeful cry, 'they –did –not –take –Paris!' as he is ensnared by Ken, who tackles the younger boy playfully to the ground, inserting himself into this athletic game not meant for people with one good ankle.

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><p><em>I sat down a quarter of an hour ago to write the letter you asked for, Anne, but I find I simply cannot write it. At this moment little Stuart Ross has goaded my daughter and Nina of next door (the one with the voice from Elsewhere) into a game of Tig and Ken in spite of his ankle, is even now limping after them in a valiant effort to be included and looking younger even than Stuart. They are laughing as they haven't in weeks and Nina is singing 'Ridente La Calma*,' though whether the chaos she has in mind that must be shut out by love and tranquilty is overseas or among my peonies I can't tell you. As for how she's singing while flying like a youthful hart or roe** over the lawn, I can't tell you that either. <em>

_Anyway, I've been watching them and can think of nothing except the day Ken broke his leg playing in the catacombs outside Rome and how for weeks after we had it set he tried ineffectually to chase Persis through the Forum as if he'd never broken a bone in his life. He looked just like he does now. I don't see how it's any different from that memory of yours about Walter asleep, and if dwelling on it makes me like Gertrude Oliver –who I've always liked –and you, then I'm glad to know we're all in the same boat. I'll leave the sterning† to you though –I was always hopeless at that sort of thing. _

_Yours ever, etc._

_Leslie_

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><p>*'Ridente La Calma' is a song for a long time attributed to Mozart. It's first few lines tell approximately of the peace inspired by love and its ability to dissipate anger and fear.<p>

**'In context the couplet is Fly like a youthful hart or roe/ over the hill where spices grow' from a hymn 'Who is this Fair One in Distress.'

†The computer assures me 'sterning' is not a word, so I thought perhaps it might be a Canadianism. At any rate, Leslie means, and I take it to mean, the steering of a canoe.


	5. He's Gone Away

**I could not believe the warmth of the reviews that came in this last week. I don't know where that previous chapter came from, but I am glad you took to it. I would love to know how you get on with this chapter too -I have been trying for days to make it do what I want. **

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><p>What's the joke mum?' says Ken to his mother as he passes her the marmalade. They are sitting with Persis at the kitchen table in the first hour of uncertain daylight. It is too early to justify drawing the curtains and so the light comes through in the pattern of the gingham check on the curtains that turns everything the colour of weak tea.<p>

'Yes,' says Persis, 'what's struck you so?'

Leslie, sitting at the head end of the table has given way to the golden laughter that had caught Anne's attention all those years ago.

'Listen,' she says.

_Susan says the surest remedy against lack of sleep is to conjure ways of torturing the Kaiser to death. Apparently she poured boiling water on him last night._

'Only Susan, honestly,' says Leslie in the despairing way usually reserved for wayward animals and children, 'as if there weren't enough gruesomeness going about. Torturing the Kaiser!'

'Oh I don't know,' says Ken, 'I might give it a try. It has to beat staring at the ceiling anyway.'

'Why, aren't you sleeping?' asks Leslie, pausing over-long in the pouring out of fresh coffee and causing it to overrun the lip of her cup.

'_Mum!'_ and Ken tries to exchange a meaningful look with his sister. She will none of it; she is absorbed in a letter from Una Meredith and so only says mildly, 'you earned that one, Ken. What else does Aunt Anne say?'

'Oh this and that,' says Leslie, determinedly glossing her reading out of this letter, sure her children needn't know the extent of the worry that is rampant at Ingleside any more than they need unearth her own everyday anxieties.

'Here's a conundrum one of you might have the answer to.'

_One other thing and then I'll close –I promised Gertrude and Susan both that I'd see if you had any thoughts on the pronunciation of Przemysl. You have, haven't you Leslie?_

'As it happens, I haven't the least idea how that place's name is meant to be pronounced. Ten to one I've mangled it just now. If I had a penny for every time Susan supposed that because we've travelled the world I can speak every language under Heaven….' Leslie does not finish but waves the letter vaguely in the direction of the kitchen curtains.

'Well _one_ of you have a go,' she says when the kitchen resounds with meditative silence, '–I have to write back _something_. Ken? Persis –you always had a knack for languages.'

'Hm?' says Persis, looking up properly this time from Una's letter.

'P-R-Z-E-M-Y-S-L, how would you go about pronouncing that?'

'_I'm_ not brave enough to try,' says Persis, 'but I'll put it to Nina if you like –if anyone can parse it, I expect she can.'

'Yes of course,' says Ken, 'isn't she reimersing herself in unpronounceable words at the moment, singing Tatyana or something for the R.C.M*.?'

'All words not English are unpronounceable to you Ken,' says Persis lightly, 'but I think this time you may actually be right.'

'I'm often right,' says Ken with affected hurt, 'lots of the time, even.'

'Well give me a clue about Przemysl then,' says Leslie equal parts amused and practical.

Ken says helpfully, 'I really think you'll do much better asking Nina.'

'Oh I give up,' says Leslie, setting the letter by and throwing up both hands in a gesture of exasperation she doesn't feel even remotely.

'Persis, turn about is fair, what's in that letter of Una's that's so absorbed you?'

'Lobster season,' says Persis, 'at least partly.'

_October - 1914_

_Carl says Oran Crawford brought a live lobster into Harbour Head School the other day, _runs Una Meredith's letter, her handwriting seemingly learnt from a regency era sampler. _Any other teacher would have had kittens over it, not least because Oran set it loose among the desks. As it was, Carl picked it up by the middle and set it up on the desk in an impromptu aquarium and called off arithmetic in favour of Darwin. You can imagine how the mothers in Harbour Head took to that. Already there have been three McAllisters, two McNeils, and a handful of sheepish Crawfords wanting to know how a minister's son is so well read on the subject of Darwin. It doesn't matter how many times father tells them Darwin wasn't irreligious, that no Victorian seeking credulity dared to be __that__, they have all gone away unconvinced. Norman Douglas happened to be calling in when the latest indignant Crawford arrived and he vocalised for all of us the exasperation we'd been trying not to feel, but his shouting sent Bruce's kitten Stripey bolting behind the piano and he has been there since having steadfastly resisted our best efforts to coax him out. _

_Faith tried him on a saucer of cream and Bruce with a sugar-cube and Carl lay on his stomach in front of the piano making a feather on a string move across the floor, but he wanted none of it. I put out a portion of fish meant for tomorrow but to no avail. He even resisted Rosemary singing 'Goosey Goosey Gander' at him, which has never failed before. We tend to joke that if nothing else he recognises the word 'mouse' and is drawn out in search of one. No doubt he will leave the piano just as soon as we all give him up as a lost cause and then we'll hear about it no end. _

_Anyway, we won't have anything like the Lobster Incident happen again for a while, I expect, as I gather lobster season is ending now as the days draw in –though I dare say Stripey bolting will be fairly routine unless he grows nerves or Norman Douglas learns how to talk at conversational level when discussing politics. It's a shame because given the news we're hearing of Ypres we need anecdotes like that._

'You've gone an awfully queer colour,' said Ken to his sister, 'you all right, butterfly?'

'Why wouldn't I be,' asks Persis,' seeing him reach for toast from the rack and sending the butter dish his way.

'You didn't look it just a moment ago.'

'No? Well I suppose I was thinking Germany has invaded pretty completely to have breached even the front of letters from Una. Faith you expect to keep up with politics –all those hours holding her own against Norman Douglas, but somehow for Una to write of anything besides the Sunday Sermon, Glen news and why you have to sift flour to stop a sponge sinking seems wrong.'

'Yes, I can see how it would,' says Ken, his butter knife clinking precipitately against the lip of a dish decorated with Lavender Roses.

'A bit like the sun failing to come up, which it is doing ever later at the moment, or Nina giving up her music, or something. Incidentally, when _is_ lobster season? I should have thought it had been and gone.'

'That I should have lived,' says Leslie, despairingly again, 'to hear a child of mine ask when lobster season is! There are two of them in P.E.I., since you're asking, and this is the end of the second one. Did you really never go and watch the boats come into the harbour with the traps?'

'Not that I remember,' says Ken.

'I should have thought it just Jem's cup of tea –though perhaps that's it –it was more usually Walter you chummed with wasn't it? Though generally speaking where you found one brother you found the other.'

'Well…'begins Ken, thinking of his latest visit to the Island and questioning somewhat the veracity of his mother's sentiment towards the end of it.

'When they were little, I mean,' amends Leslie, apparently adding the divination of her children's innermost thoughts to the abilities much lauded by her husband in the dedications of his books.

'Perhaps it fell out of fashion after all,' she says, returning to the lobsters, 'I know Kenneth and I always thought it a glorious way to spend a summer afternoon. The harbour was so full and bustling and _exciting_. Stuart Ross would have loved it.'

'I expect he would,' says Persis, 'we'll have to remember it should he ever come on holiday with us. I don't suppose we're going to be allowed to hear what's come for you Ken?'

'Nothing very interesting,' says Ken, rising and vanishing through the kitchen door before his mother and sister can protest the mundanity of Przemysl's pronunciation and live lobsters in schoolrooms.

'That's either Rilla writing him –Anne swears she is –or it's the Home Office and to do with the war,' says Leslie rather flatly. 'I seriously hope it's the former.'

* * *

><p>It is the war office after all. It is not until Christmas, however, that Ken communicates as much.<p>

'I wanted to be sure there was something to tell you,' he says in answer to his mother's wide, worried eyes.

'There didn't seem a lot of point in making a to-do if in the end they said I wouldn't pass the medical for months.'

_December -1914_

_We have been steeling ourselves against this_, writes Leslie in that week's letter to Anne, _but in the event it is somehow greater and more awful and also flatter than I had imagined. I always supposed Ken's going would involve a good deal of bustle, but actually we have all fallen still. We sit together at the table or in the good parlour or wherever and watch one another. Owen, who has always been partial to Persis because she can be still, cannot take his eyes off of Ken –he just sits with his hands steepled and drinks him in as if he means to write Ken into a book for surety. A kind of safeguard against –but what was it you said? Writing it out would make it real? I shan't take that chance either. Owen is a marvellous writer but even he couldn't capture Ken on paper. That is he could, but it wouldn't be Ken. _

_I'm not making sense this evening Anne, forgive me. Someday soon you will have a coherent letter from me, but not today. _

_January 1915_

_I am tired of coherent things, _reads Anne's answer. _The newspapers are nothing but and all they do is tell me that whichever battle we've lost hasn't any significance. Perhaps none of them __has__ but then why are we sending boys overseas in droves?_

* * *

><p>They <em>are<em> leaving in droves too, as the Fords discover when they make the journey to Union Station to see Ken off. The platforms are brimful with people, many of them young men in khaki. There is simply no way to say a meaningful and private goodbye; the war has made public that irrevocable moment of parting. At every turn they are jostled by porters, conductors, and men on the brink of leaving home. There is just time for Ken to be kissed ad embraced and shaken hands with by all who matter and then he is on the train, barreling out of the station and his last hasty impression home is the bustle of the station tinged with the scent of hyacinths and yew berries.

It is for this reason it is as well all the goodbyes that matter are said the night before, on a cool April evening in the yew-bowered garden of the Sussex Avenue house. Nina crosses the lawn to join them almost tentatively, the very question she poses with her lips, _is it all right if I come over_, apparent even in the way she moves.

'Do,' says Ken, 'for goodness' sake do. Butterfly and I will be haunted by ghosts if you don't, and ghosts at this time of night aren't pleasant things for anyone.'

'Yes,' says Persis, 'you must, it wouldn't be right without you. Only —bring pleasant news with you.'

'But I can't do that,' says Nina, even as she joins her friends on the lawn. She sits back on her heels and tucks her skirt carefully around her.

'I've only been reading the same papers you have, and the Armenians are just as besieged as ever and the reports from Ypres no better than they were when you read about them.'

'Sing something then,' says Ken, stretching out on the lawn and looking heavenward as he says it. 'The world will be temporarily restored to order if you do.'

'No, I couldn't, not tonight,' says Nina, 'I would have to be all light and bright and sparkling and I don't feel at all like that at the moment.'

'Nor could we be,' says Persis sympathetically. 'What are you learning at the moment? That will do in a pinch, won't it?'

Nina says it will not.

'Nina, if you won't sing something,' says Ken half-seriously, 'then I have a terrible presentiment that the last piece of music I hear played well will be that terrible thing about the Scottish Soldier as played on the pipes –and I _don't_ mean a flute. Let's see if I can get the tune, _there was a soldier, a Scottish soldier…_'

It is Ken's unsteady bass mangling that most sentimental of ballads that causes Nina to yield.

'All right, all right,' she says, diving into the rhododendrons for preservation from the out-of-tune music and folding her arms over her head.

'But only because I've been working on it for the conservatory –and you must promise to tell me where I go wrong.'

Before they can promise or she can change her mind, Nina has launched into that well-remembered letter-scene of Tchaikovsky's**. Leslie, knitting a blanket in the round, hears it and is struck by how _right_ Nina is for Tatyana, and not only because she is an amateur student. Then Leslie remembers what Anne has written, what she suspects of Little Rilla and the back of her neck turns to gooseflesh. It is one thing to hear this fictive declaration of love shaped into a letter by the lips of a young woman singing for the opera –but how many of them, Leslie wonders, how many flesh-and-blood girls will be doing exactly that in the months, even years to come? She begins to count them off on her fingers in time to the rhythmic clicking of her needles but is stopped when the quotidian realisation that she has dropped a stitch somewhere along the row is brought home to her.

Leslie begins to pick apart the row and realises as she does so that she never did discover for Anne and Susan how to pronounce Przemysl all those months ago. She could ask Nina now, the girl is some yards away on the lawn. But no - much better let her sing, Leslie decides. In a little while, a few hours even, her child's life will be compressed and speeded up; he will be shipped away for training at some strange unknowable place and he will come back to her a soldier. As long as Nina sings, he is still her little boy.

Out in the garden Nina has ceased to sing and Ken can be heard to say,

'Say, Nina, as I won't be here to see it go to performance, promise you won't be _too_ hard on whatever chap is unlucky enough to sing Onegin opposite you. Something tells me you can be just as cold as you are warm in that letter-scene. If I'm right the audience will come away with their teeth chattering.'

'If they do it won't be my fault,' says Nina, who has long been immune to Ken's variety of teasing.

'You've not heard the young man singing Onegin. It's _his_ fault, not mine, the temperature of the auditorium drops after the end of the first act –and it ought to be that way considering he's not amateur the way the rest of us are. We've run out of amateur men. They've all gone for soldiers.'

The truth of this statement is so self-evident that for a long moment the girls sit worrying stems of grass between their fingers. Ken feels uncomfortably that it is incumbent on him to restore them both to rights, but he can think of nothing meaningful to say. Nor it seems can Nina and Persis; it is shortly after this that Nina rises to go.

'Goodbye and good luck,' she says, bending to give Ken a sister's kiss goodnight, 'and for goodness' sake come _back_. I shan't forgive you otherwise, neither of us will.'

* * *

><p>Later, when the house has retired for the evening and the moon is full, he creeps down to his sister's room the way he used to do in childhood, to see she is still there.<p>

'Butterfly,' he says at the doorway, 'are you asleep?'

'As if I could be,' says Persis, sitting up and drawing the bedspread back. They are years too old but all the same he comes and lies down beside her as if they were children again and conspiring to talk late into the night.

'You never did promise,' she says.

'Promise what, butterfly, and when?'

'Earlier,' says Persis, 'you remember –Nina said you must promise to come back. You never did.'

With her hair down and the quilt enveloping her she looks to Ken strikingly like the little sister he used to soothe to sleep the first night they travelled to anywhere new, anywhere not yet home. If it were not for the last traces of the hyacinth scent he associates with her he would suppose that he had been transported backward in time and this was nothing more than one of those first, new evenings.

'Promise you won't go and get yourself killed,' says Persis. Ken has never yet failed to honour a promise he has made her and she cannot now help the superstitious belief that if Ken says he will come back then he will.

'All right,' says Ken, as one giving in under much duress, 'I promise. I pronounce that I will live. But you must promise equally you won't go and have your heart broken.'

'I shouldn't think that very likely,' says Persis.

'I know but I'll feel better for hearing it anyway – I _shall _be killed if my mind is elsewhere worrying about you.'

'_Don't_ Ken.'

'But promise?'

'Yes all right, I promise'

Sometime after that they sleep.

* * *

><p>* The R.C.M. is the Royal Conservatory of Music. Canadian acronyms for things tend to look distressingly alike, which is why I've starred it.<p>

** This is the letter-scene from _Eugene Onegin_ again. I don't know why it appears to have taken root in this story, it simply has. I think it has to do with how I hear Nina's voice and the music that suits it.


	6. If You Cannot Sing Like Angels

**Here at last is another instalment. I'm sorry it's taken so long, I've been short on reliable technology. Thank you for being patient about it and as ever, thank you for your reviews. **

* * *

><p>Nina, letting herself into the house on Sussex Acenue by way of the Parlour windows, calls out somewhere in the region of C above Middle C, 'tell me, have you had news of Your Island lately?<p>

As she speaks she begins to thread her way through cliques of chairs and occasional tables, weaving her way towards the hall. Persis meets her in the passage, a sheet of what looks to be tracing papers still in hand.

' I thought it had to be you,' Persis says. 'Stuart Ross is an imp I know but he's not _quite_ daring enough to let himself into the house.'

'I didn't think you would mind,' Nina says. '_Have_ you had news of your Island? You might tell me if you have.'

'A little,' says Persis, indicating the tracing paper, 'from Una. Come into the front room and we'll read it together. I was only making a beginning when I heard you come in.'

They settle on the carpeted floor of the front room, Nina with the impeccable posture particular to singers and Persis in a relaxed s-shape that recalls a Blakean watercolour. Holding the tracing paper so as to catch the afternoon light, Persis begins to read

_They have all gone now, or pretty nearly. There's only Shirley from our set at home still, or at any rate at Redmond, but he writes us so infrequently he might be anywhere. You are thinking that of course we still have Bruce up at home, and we have, but he has such an old, anxious soul that it's not really the same. The other day he wanted to know if the Belgian babies were really in danger, 'because after all, God loves the children , doesn't he?' It had been his Sunday School lesson this week gone and had stuck rather. Neither Rosemary nor I could tell him they very likely weren't, even if it hadn't been bedtime. Whereas when Faith, Jerry, Carl and I were growing up the was a good deal more galumphing and arguing and noise than Bruce could ever hope to make - though of course he hasn't anyone to argue with really..._

Persis gets no further because, as if in direct challenge to Una's letter there is a good deal of galumphing mingled with the sound of bicycle tires on gravel and overtop the clatter the sound of a bright young voice singing lustily,

_Ah mes Amis! Quel jour que fête..._

'That's never Staurt Ross,' says an unbelieving Persis.

'If it is, ' says Nina, her mouth twitching at some private and incomunicable joke, ' I shall never forgive you for not telling me sooner he could sing. No, don't call out just yet, I want to see if...no, not quite, but very nearly.' For even as Nina is speaking, Staurt leaps for and misses a Top C by a gnat's crotchet*. He continues to sing undeterred, breaking off only when Persis calls out to him through the window,

'What news, Stuart?'

'Where did you learn to sing like that? Nina asks simultaneously.

''I haven't learned,' says Stuart a little self-consciously, 'not exactly. I heard a fellow sing it ages back, when war was declared. You remember?'

'As if we would ever forget!' says Persis, 'Really Stuart. Are you out on Robert's bicycle?'

'Well,' says Stuart, 'he's not here to use it and I s'pose someone ought to take it out now and then. Say, mind if I come in?'

Before Persis can answer, Stuart has propped the bicycle up against the wall of the house, precariously near to Leslie's rose beds and is climbing in through the window. Unlike the French windows that Nina navigated earlier, the windows to the front room are far from designed to facilitate a person's entry through them, so it should hardly come as a surprise when Stuart's over-eager ankle misjudges it's mark and knocks a bottle of ink from the wtiting desk he's climbing onto.

'How is a raven like a writing desk,' he asks not a bit sheepishly as he settles himself comfortably atop the desk

'Because Poe wrote on both you rascal,' says Persis from the doorway. She is retreating for a cloth to staunch the spilled ink.

'You don't mind?' Stuart asks, ankles knocking against the side of the desk and narrowly missing a collision with the chair in front of him.

'I shan't if you stay put till I come back,' says Persis, and she goes out. From the kitchen she can just catch Nina saying,

'Has no one ever told you that you sing well?'

When Persis returns Stuart leaps down from the desk and grabs at her arm, babbling excitedly as he does so, 'Nina's going to teach me to sing, isn't it marvellous? Peggy and Robert always said it was cissy for boys to sing, but Nina says not and she is going to teach me so that I can break even more hearts than Ken _and_ sing better.'

'I shouldn't think that last takes much doing,' says Persis dryly and ducking her head so as not to be seen to be smiling.

* * *

><p>Nina always would say in after years that Stuart Ross and the conservatory constituted her war-work. By her own admission she is not naturally gifted at needlecraft and therefore not much help tithe Red Cross and its efforts. She can and does sing though, and consequently she is by way of being a favourite with the Royal Conseratory of Music not only for her accuracy but for her capacity to enervate whatever music she is charged with learning. All that autumn of 1915 she polishes the part of Tchaikovsky's Tatyana in preparation for a winter convert, and when she is not so engaged, she teaches Little Stuart Ross to sing. It is not <em>'Ah Mes Amis!' — <em>not to start with —but even so Sussex Avenue rings with the joyful sound of his first forays into the songs of its ancestors and is made glad by it.

That year too the various places set up across the country on purpose to train and house soldiers become so overcrowded that Christie Pitts park in Toronto is adapted to further accommodate excess volunteers until they could be sent on to Valcartier or further still, to England.

In light of this it ought not to come as a surprise when the war brings Carl Meredith to the door of the Sussex Avenue house, 'because' he says later by way of explanation, 'Kingsport needed to send us on and make room for the others but couldn't think where to send us.' Somehow though this does come as a surprise; chiefly because no one has been forwarned and Sussex Avenue that late September evening is in near-darkness, the only evidence of life being the sound of a soprano refining the part of Tatyana and a candle in the front room of what Carl takes to be the Fords' home. And it is because he is so unlooked for that Persis greets him with, 'but we thought you had gone on to Quebec. However do you come to be _here_ ?'

Carl gives her a smile that is more a lighting up of his face than it is a movement of his lips.

'Not much of a greeting is it?' He says, but he does not sound as though he minds.

'No —only the others have gone out and no one wrote to say you were coming —or did they and has the letter not come through?'

'Nothing like that,' says Carl easily, 'home doesn't happen to know much more about my turning up here than you do. I noticed the address taking a passel of letters to Kingsport to post for Rosemary and Una when I went — the postage comes to less that way, you know — and I thought given there's supposed to be some sort of connection between Rosemary and your mother, it struck me it was the sort of thing Rosemary would like me to do, once I knew I was coming I mean.'

'Yes of course,' says Persis. 'I don't suppose you know what the connection is? I've often wondered.'

'You want Miss Cornelia to answer that,' Carl says, 'or possibly Jerry. He's the one that goes in for History. I could tell you about a Silver Water Beetles though,' he adds as an afterthought, 'I've been looking into them in the time I haven't got. Kingsport was full of them.'

'This may strike you as odd,' says Psrsis, much as though she is talking with Little Stuart in one of his especially impish moments, 'but it is Mrs. Meredith and mum that interest me, not the Silver Water Beetles. Come in out of the cold, do, before the warmth of the house goes out, and tell me, was it very bad at Union?'

'I don't know,' says Carl, 'I'd never seen it before. Though I got a pretty good idea of what so many bees in a hive must feel like.'

'It _was_ bad then' Persis says apologetically, 'we thought we had seen the worst of it with all the men _going. _Now look, I really did mean it about you coming in out of the cold. You'll turn blue otherwise, and I was never long enough in Toronto growing up to go in with the Guides and learn about how to treat frostbite and all that sort of thing.'

Carl does come in and with him come all the usual questions that are inevitable when newly arrived somewhere.

'Tea or coffee,' Persis says now, beginning to move out of the front hall and towards the kitchen. Because Carl has never before had cause to call at the Sussex Avenue house the question has all the ritual newness occasioned by Persis's not being prepossessed of the answer.

'Tea if that's all right,' says Carl, sitting down at the kitchen table.

'Perfectly all right. ' Persis produces from the recesses of one of the myriad kitchen cupboards a variety of rosewood teachest that would not have been out of place in Miss Gaskell's village of Cranford.

'Green or black,' asks Persis now, procuring a key from somewhere about her person and applying it to the box. Then, getting no answer, 'what have you found to absorb you so? Is there a house spider or something like it?'

'Not at all. Why? Would it matter if I had? Do you mind them much, I mean, house spiders?'

'Not particularly. You must realise by now thst curiosity is a vice of mine. It's dad's chief fault too, so I come by it honestly. You seemed taken up with something, that's all.'

'Well, if you want to know, I was taking in the ritual of tea-making. I wouldn't like to say for certain but I think you may take more steps to make it up than my sister.'

'I gather that takes doing?' Says Persis only half-seriously.

'Rather. That is, if Una's making tea. Faith just seems to throw leaves and hot water together and hope for the best. I think I prefer this way, it gives it more weight, and Una always says tea invariably demotes crises or occasions.'

'And which is this?'

'I don't know. We seem so often to be in crisis at the moment...'

'We had better make this an occasion then, ' says Persis decisively.

'Then that's all right,' says Carl. 'I was worried, after turning up so unexpectedly like that. ..' again he leaves the sentence unfinished.

'Nonsense,' says Persis firmly. 'It was only that I was caught unaware earlier. You mustn't cast it up to me. We've heard so many stories about young men in uniform going about like angels of death to tell families...' this time it is she who leaves the thought incomplete.

' I never thought,' says Carl as one suddenly realising a very obvious truth. 'We don't get to hear stories like that. Are there so many going about?'

'Enough. It's silly of course, because Ken isn't really in a way to be struck down by Huns at the moment. The letter we had the other day was words to the effect that if he never left England then at least his regiment would be the most well-trained lot of men in Canada.'

'Yes —well —but look, you mustn't cast _that_ up to _me_. Say you won't and we'll come out even. I did tell you about the green tea, didn't I?'

'No,' says Persis, 'not a word. Do you like it or not?'

'Yes, that is, I think so. Are those really leaves?'

'They are, the larger the leaves the better the tea.'

I'Ive heard that but really, those are like caterpillars.' Carl crosses the room and peers over Persis's shoulder at the tea nestled in the pot.

'They uncurl like caterpillars too. Tell me if I'm being a nuisance won't you, Faith always does, and Jerry.'

'You're all right,'says Persis, settling the lid on the teapot. 'You'll like their name too —Silver Needle — it might almost be the sort of thing you call a caterpillar.'

'It does sound rather like one,' says Carl in agreement. 'Here, can I be useful?' He is faintly aware that he is asking fractionally too late, already Persis has unearthed from the tea cupboard a pair of cast-iron teabowls with gold and red enamel dragons coiled protectively round them for ornamentation. They are so serpentine and so unlike the dragons he and Jerry conjured up in their boyhood reenactment of St George and the Dragon that for a moment Carl mistakes these for caterpillars too.

'Now what's struck you?' Persis wants to know, manipulating the kitchen door with her elbow. Again it strikes Carl belatedly that he ought to be helpful, opening doors or something active, but by now it is late in the evening and he contents himself with relaying the memory of the Maywater reenactments of Lives of the Saints.

* * *

><p><em>Be careful<em>, Ken nearly writes, in answer to his sister's account of that evening, _you promised you'd take care Butterfly_. But then he reads over her letter and decides that really he is making too much of it . After all, it is hard to imagine much coming of green tea in cast-iron teabowls and talk of caterpillars.

* * *

><p>*With apologies to <em>I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue<em>


	7. O Silver Moon

**Thank you as ever for your reviews. Here is the chapter that made me write this story out in the first place. It is one of my musical chapters, and for 'O Silver Moon' as I heard it while writing, it was Renée Flemming's I listened to and have in mind for Nina.**

* * *

><p>It is October and the yew trees outside the house on Sussex Avenue rustle like so many eolian harps in their autumnal nakedness. At their feet swirl colourful eddies of leaves and high overhead, shrouded by the yews, is the moon, silvery and swollen to fullness. It is to this, the moon that Nina is singing.<p>

At the Sussex Avenue house again, tea is being poured into cast-iron teabowls enamelled with coiled dragons.

'You know,' says Persis, 'You never did say how long you would be in Toronto for.'

'I don't know,' Carl says, 'no one has told us. I begin to understand what your brother meant about our coming out of this mess the best-trained soldiers in Christiandom.'

'Do you?' Persis asks, 'that is, I don't think that's a worry he has just at the moment. It's been displaced by how wet the weather has grown.'

'I thought English weather was always wet?'

'Ye-es —only they're not in England.'

'Is he not?' asks Carl, 'I mean, is that what was in the letter?'

'Which letter?'

'The one you had when I came over. You were reading it, or writing an answer.'

'Oh that,' Persis says, realising, 'not a letter, a drawing. Stuart Ross on his brother's bicycle. It was how I heard we were at war, he cycled out our way and told me — or something like that. I can't seem to catch that moment the way I'd like to. You must have been at the Harbour Light?'

'Yes, teasing Ned Burr's collie because I'm not keen on taffy, couldn't dance and it was too dark to look along the sand for sandpipers or in the water for minnows.'

Carl picks up a teabowls as he speaks and curses the impulse that makes him do so; being cast-iron it has retained the heat of the tea and makes his palms smart.

'They were a gift from the Tanakas,' says Persis. 'We have six of them, they still have the other six. Mrs. Tanaka said if we wouldn't take all of them then we must have a teabowls apiece and two for company.'

'But why give them to you at all?' Carl asks. He is still rubbing his palms against his knees to take the sting of the cast-iron out of them.

'Because I fell in love with the set while we were living there. I was at that hopelessly awkward stage where I was neither girl nor grown-up and Mrs. Tanaka used to let Suzuki —that was the daughter —and I, take them into the garden for tea the way she and mother did. We sat in the garden - it was one of those vast gardens that recall Eden — under the holly and the maples, and drank green tea. Silver Needle, like this, and Dragon's Pearls, and exquisit jasmine leaves all wrapped up by hand to look like butterflies. I loved the ritual of it. And of course it appealed to me that I needn't worry about breaking anything.'

Persis smiles at the memory and unconsciously runs an index finger around the lip of her teabowl. 'Mrs. Tanaka always said I was to have the remaining six as a wedding gift someday.' Without appearing to notice the temperature of the enamelled bowl, she cups it in her hands and sips at it.

'They mean Japan to me,' she says, 'Japan and home. We were at home there.'

'I should have thought,' says Carl, ' that you could be at home anywhere?'

'You would think that, wouldn't youz. I mean, it would make sense. But if you travel about too much —and we did —it becomes difficult to feel at home. Suddenly you're not migrating for a season but living like nomads, and you don't want to put down roots in case you are left behind when the others move again. That's why Japan was important. We dared to feel settled there. I don't suppose there are many places Ken and I would say that about. I think that's really why he started to call me 'butterfly' —whatever grand reasoning he's come up with since.'

_Does he_, Carl means to ask, but says instead, 'where else, were you at home I mean?'

'The Island, I think, and Nina's house when Ken and I lived there.'

'Not here?'

'This house? Oh I'm coming to feel at home in it, but only because I don't dare leave it for elsewhere. I have a child's horror of going out to Kensington a Market one morning and coming back to find it a gaping ruin —the Union Jack in tatters, the Kaiser's flag rampant, all that sort of thing. Nonsense of course.

'No,' says Carl, 'but there is altogether too much war news. We can't escape it; we are being overwhelmed by it. We cannot eat or sleep or dream but it looms up to haunt us like Banquo's ghost in _Macbeth_. Don't let's talk about it now. Tell me something else. Tell me about Nina, that's her singing, isn't it?'

'Yes,' says Persis. 'You must come hear her in concert if you're still about at Christmastime.'

'I should like that. It's Tatyana she's singing, isn't it?'

'Then, yes. But not tonight, not now.'

From the house next door comes the heartfelt moan of a violin. For once NIna's singing is not without accompaniment.

'Oh?' says Carl, ' who is she this evening? You'll have to give me a clue, I never 'did' music.'

'With Rosemary Meredith in the house? However did you manage that?' Then, relenting, Persis says, 'She's Rusalka tonight, singing her voice into the hands of the Witch of the Sea.'

'Rusalka?'

'A water-nymph. Like one of your minnows. She says,

_Silvery moon in the great dark sky,_

_thy beams see farther than we do,_

_Over the world, goes wandering,_

_Even if only for a while...*'_

'How do you know Russian? It is Russian, isn't it?'

'Czech,' says Persis, 'and you try living with Owen Ford and not learning all sorts of languages.'

'When did you need Czech? And how is it not Russian?'

'You want to ask Nina that last thing,' says Persis. 'As to how I learnt it, there's a host of grammars upstairs in the study. Ken had letterpresses, I had languages.'

'Yes but —oh I give up. What else does she say?'

'Why? For a novel, like so much else dad does. But Rusalka... She says,

_Over the world goes wandering, even if only for a while._

Then the chorus.

_May he though far away, know my thoughts._

_Tell him, o tell him, __I am here, waiting.'_

The rising octave, the falling sixth come alive when rendered by Nina; the words ache and plead their case to the moon. Translated by Persis they do not diminish in import. The violin keens, the introduction is halved; there is not enough time. The audience in the house on Sussex Avenue hardly dare breathe.

'_Tell him o silvery moon sailing by,_

_That in my arms I enfold him,_

_Tell him in dreams to think of me,_

_Be it for only a while._'

Again the chorus, the rising octave, falling sixth and then the low tremor of the violin, its music rising from the very womb of the world.

'Is that it?' Carl asks in a whisper.

'Not at all. Listen. Never let Nina tell you she can't sing below E on the staff, that's a D. The Rusalka is saying to the moon,

_Human soul should it dream of me, let my memory be wakened be._

That's clumsy but the best I can manage. I never claimed to be an expert linguist. Now hush and see if...'

Out of the candlelit gloom comes glimmering into the world Nina's Top B Flat.

'Of course she landed it,' Persid murmurs, 'never is Nina more at home than at the pinnacle of a treble clef.'

'But what does it mean?'

'Does it matter? Let me think...something like,

_Moon, o moon, do not go,_

or _do_ _not wane_.'

They are quiet, waiting perhaps for Nina to begin again. She does not. It occurs to Persis that they are sitting only in the yellow glow of the candles on the mantle and windowsill of the front room.

'You ought to have told me,' she says, ' I would have put the electric on ages ago.'

'I don't mind,' says Carl, 'besides, I was listening. And it's masses better than trying to make out the Methodist gravestones by glow-worms at midnight.'

Wasn't there a moon the night you sat out there?'

'No, it was pouring down with rain. The clouds covered it over. _He holdeth back the face of his throne and spreadeth his cloud upon it._ ** Or that's what it felt like. Anyway, I have a sort of idea you would rather the candles.'

'Have you?'

'I have. I think — tell me —it's like the teabowls. They mean home to you, don't they?'

'I suppose they do.'

'Will you promise me something?' Carl says then. He is holding one of the enamel teabowls, it has cooled sufficiently that this should be possible.

'If — when —I go away, will you see there is always a candle on the windowsill, just as there is now? It's silly, but when I was little and couldn't sleep, mother used to leave one lighted on the dresser for me. That was in Maywater. Then she died and we came away and Aunt Martha stopped letting me have one because of the expense and because she thought boys oughtn't to mind the dark. Of course it wasn't for very long — I mean Rosemary came to us after that, and she wouldn't have minded the expense, would have given me a legion of candles if I'd wanted them...but by then I was desperate for Jerry's admiration and had developed a boy's horror of looking cissy. Besides, and this will sound awful —Rosemary was lovely but not mother. And it's the one clear memory I have of mother, those candles. It felt disloyal to ask anyone else for even half of one. But I like to think — it would help, somehow, if I knew that there was a candle to keep the dark at bay here, even if only for a while. I could feel safe then. I told you it was silly.'

'No,' says Persis, thinking of the promise she extracted from Ken, _promise you won't go and get yourself killed_ she had said, 'strange things make us feel secure at the moment. Of course I'll see there's a candle there in the evenings —but I don't like to think of you going away.'

'I suppose it might be worse,' says Carl, 'I mean, I might be leaving a sweetheart or something.'

'Aren't you though?'

'I didn't think I was,' he says uncertainly. 'Now...'

'Now?'

'Now —but it will be all right, I'll be sure to come back, I promise.'

* * *

><p>* Rusalka's 'Song to the Moon' by Anton Dvorjak. I wish I could credit someone with the translation I have used, but it comes to me handwritten —I believe by my music teacher— on my copy of the score. If anyone does know whose it is, do, please, tell me.<p>

** Job 26:9


	8. Hello Here's a Soldier Bold

**Thank you again for so many lovely and warm reviews. I've said at the beginning but I'm going to reiterate here; Stuart and his family are not mine; I've lifted them from Timothy Findley's book _The Wars. _I want to say it again because part of Stuart's conversation here has it's roots in the other book. My hope is it will make sense even if you've not read the other, so if this isn't the case, I really do want to know. **

* * *

><p>'Have I come in at an awkward moment?' Nina is hovering at the front door of the Sussex Avenue house even as she speaks; she continues to hover there in anticipation of her answer. There is a strong suggestion that at the least hint of inconvenience she will flit vilja-like* back to the house on the corner of Sussex and Huron street.<p>

'Not at all,' says Persis, coming to meet her on the stoop, 'you've just missed mum. She's gone down to Rosedale to see if she can talk Mrs. Ross into doing something besides walking in the ravine and haunting St. Paul's like a ghost. I was about to follow her out.'

'Oh I see –was it Peggy making a crisis out of nothing do you think? She always did when we were in school.'

'Really Nina,' says Persis affectionately, 'I think that may be the most unforgiving thing I've ever heard you say –it's perfectly true though, about Peggy. No, it was Stuart who 'phoned. Peggy's out basting sheets or something. I know Stuart exaggerates –about how high he can climb a tree or the number of fish he can catch –but never about his mother.'

'No,' agrees Nina, 'the trouble with Mrs. Ross is that you could exaggerate all you wanted to about her and it would still probably be true. I suppose I _had _better come along. It's a short list, the things I wouldn't do for Stuart Ross.'

'I know what you mean,' says Persis, fussing with the Alice-key that locks the front door.

When they meet Carl going up the garden walk as they come down it, it takes only a matter of minutes to talk him into journeying to Rosedale with them.

'Stuart will be glad of someone he can talk insects with,' they say, and the three of them set off together.

Stuart is in the front garden of the South Drive house teasing a large and soft-jawed dog with a baseball bat when Persis, Carl and Nina come up the walk. The dog on the lawn with Stuart is a beautiful Welsh Spaniel trained for flushing and retrieving. Stuart swings the bat in an arc over her head and she makes a leap as though to catch it. He is whistling a bit breathlessly and therefore imperfectly, _Ah, Mes Amis!_ _Quel jour de fête_…

'You can't sing with a tense back,' Nina calls out in spite of herself.

'What in goodness name are you doing to that poor dog?' that is Carl, more than half serious.

'Stuart –are you quite all right?' Persis.

Stuart raises his left hand in salute, an acknowledgement that he has heard them and that yes, he is all right.

At that moment the dog leaps and closes her mouth around the bat. She brings it to the ground and tussles with Stuart for mastery over it.

'You'll spoil her, playing like that,' says Carl authoritatively.

'Ah, she doesn't mind, not really,' says Stuart. He takes a step back the better to brace himself against the weight of the dog and gives the bat another tug.

'He's right, you know,' says Nina, settling with Persis on the garden wall at a safe distance from dog and boy, and unable to resist adding, 'and I really did mean it about singing with a tense back.'

'I'm not singing,' says Stuart impishly, 'only whistling. Don't you think she's enjoying the game?' he gives the bat another tug.

'That's not what I meant,' says Carl, 'anyone can see she's enjoying herself. But she's not a pet, not really, is she? Spaniels so rarely are, I mean. What is it they say about gun-dogs? It takes months to raise one and minutes to ruin one?'

'Yes that's it,' says Nina, nodding for emphasis.

'You two know rather a lot about it,' Persis says.

'You're forgetting I grew up on a farm,' says Nina, 'gun-dogs were my father's solution to rabbits –he hated to kill them, you see, and he could be sure a retriever would bring them back alive so he could move them on. Though I had an idea from Persis,' looking to Carl, 'that you were a minister's son.'

'Don't tell me,' says Carl with a groan, 'that gun-dogs have been added to the list of things I'm not meant to know about. I swear that list gets longer and longer. Anyway, I couldn't help picking up bits and pieces about it. All the boys I went about with lived sufficiently removed from the Glen that dogs were their solutions to rabbits and badgers too.'

'Dad says that too, about ruining a dog in a minute, I mean,' says Stuart gloomily. Then he brightens and says, 'still, I guess one morning can't hurt her. Here,' he says letting go of the bat, 'dead, Moll, dead,' and he slaps his knees in credible imitation of his father. Obediently the dog –Molly –gives up the baseball bat.

'What did I tell you?' says Stuart, grinning broadly, and recommencing his fun, swinging the bat just out of reach of the impulsive, brown-eyed spaniel.

'Dad and Robert've trained her too well to spoil in a morning. Not like mum; she's all gone to pieces since Robert went away to war.' He gives the bat an especially vicious swing and it misses Molly's ears by inches.

'It's mad of course,' he says shortly, by way of elaboration, 'I mean, it's _her_ fault –mum's that is –that Robert went at all. She wanted him to kill the rabbits and he wouldn't because the rabbits had been Rowena's and she had loved them, so Robert wouldn't kill them and Teddy Burr had to be got in to do it. He was a butcher. Really, that is, he worked for a butcher in Kensington Market.'

It dawns on Stuart then that he has possibly garbled this explanation by speaking too quickly and running his words together the way the teachers at school accuse him of doing.

Carl says to Nina, 'are you keeping up with all this?' and Stuart knows he has guessed right, even if Carl's eyes _are_ gleaming when he says it.

'It doesn't make sense, not really,' Stuart says, swinging the baseball bat too low and bringing it within reach of Molly's soft mouth. They begin to tussle for it again.

'That is, I don't understand about the rabbits either, and neither does dad, or anyone really. Ken was still here when it happened and he thought it a lot of codswollop because there was no reason someone else couldn't look after the rabbits. But Rowena loved the rabbits,' _tug_, 'and Rowena is dead,' _tug_, 'so the rabbits must die too.' Another tug.

He intones this as though it were his Sunday School verse for the week and its logic infallible. Then as an afterthought, 'Rowena was my other sister. She was –softer –than Peggy. And all anyone could say, mum, and dad and Peggy I mean, when Rowena died, was that we had been lucky,' an especially vicious tug on the bat prises it free from poor soft-jawed Molly, who yelps in dismay.

'Of course,' Stuart says quickly, resuming his game with the dog, 'they didn't mean it the way it sounds. She –Rowena –had hydro- hydroce –'

'Hydrocephalus,' say Persis and Nina for him when the word eludes Stuart.

'Yes,' says Stuart appreciatively, 'that –mum reckons, that people like that don't usually live above fifteen anyway and so Rowena got ten years grace, and so really we are lucky, or Rowena was, or something. I don't know.' He swings the bat just out of reach of Molly's mouth.

'But the point is,' Stuart says emphatically, 'it's because of the rabbits and Rowena dying that Robert became a soldier and mum's been sort of _haunted_ ever since. Well not haunted –that sounds funny, but you know, off, not –not herself all of the time –all in pieces, like I said before.'

'It has all gotten a bit difficult, hasn't it,' says Persis, feeling this woefully inadequate but thinking the summation probably is applicable to most of life since war began.

'Rather,' agrees Stuart vigourously, as Molly successfully prises the bat from him, 'that's what Robert says. Here, Moll, dead. Drop it.'

Ever obedient, Molly releases the bat. For a moment Persis, Carl and Nina think Stuart will go back to baiting her but Stuart sets the bat aside and fondling the dog's ears tells her soothingly, 'atta girl. You _are_ a good dog. Go on, now. Go Back, go back.' At the familiar command the dog gambols away around the side of the house.

Bereft of the dog Stuart comes and worms his way in between Persis and Nina on the garden wall. They have been sitting with their backs to the road, so as to take in the spectacle of Stuart and Molly playing, but now without the dog's antics to distract them, it becomes rapidly apparent why Stuart rang Sussex Avenue in the first place, and apparent too what Stuart meant when he said his mother had gone 'all to pieces.' Through the bay window is just discernable the image of Leslie Ford, her hair plaited like a live gold snake, attempting to coax Mrs. Ross away from the decanter of sherry on the drawing room sideboard. It is only ten in the morning.

It is Nina who breaks the silence that settles upon the group on the lawn and threatens to engulf them. She springs to her feet with a rapidity that rivals Molly the Welsh Spaniel and pacing theatrically around little Stuart, begins to sing,

_Hallo maiden, see him ride, _

_See the horseman prancing,_

_Has he come to choose a bride _

_From the maidens dancing?**_

The jauntiness of the tune is just what is needed. In a moment Stuart is laughing, and leaping up to join her,. He bows with all the clumsiness of twelve and begins to waltz Nina inexpertly across the lawn.

'Sing the rest of it,' he says, 'sing the rest of it.'

'Yes do,' says Persis with relief. Nina is not in a mood that needs pressing. Somehow, in spite of Stuart's efforts at waltzing, she goes on singing,

_Look up maiden mark him well, _

_Leave the dancers lonely, _

_He may like you who can tell, _

_If he sees you only!_

'You've stopped,' Stuart protests when nothing more of 'Cavalier' seems forthcoming.

'It's your turn next,' says Nina, rejoining the pair on the wall, 'and I've never taught you the cavalier's part.'

'You could teach me now,' Stuart coaxes. He flashes Nina one of his infamous grins, the kind that expose not only the whites of his teeth but the pinks of his gums too.

'I wouldn't dare. Your mother would never forgive me.'

'Oh –mum wouldn't mind,' says Stuart indifferently. This is probably true.

'Peggy then,' says Nina, 'and you needn't be in such a hurry to learn to be a madcapped cavalier. The world is running over with them as it is.'

'I'll tell you what we'll do instead,' says Carl to Stuart, 'it's a nice enough day, you fetch Molly back and we can go down to the lake. Do you know I've never seen it yet?'

'Have you not?'

'We'll want the tram for that.'

'Can we really?' this last from an exuberant Stuart.

'Why not,' says Persis, 'it's mild enough. Hasn't Indian Summer come late this year?'

'Mm,' Nina murmurs in agreement but the sound of it is drowned out by Stuart putting two fingers to his mouth and whistling shrilly. The girls clap their hands to their ears.

'Is that what they are teaching you in Scouts?' Nina wants to know.

'It's not what they taught _us_,' says Carl, rushing to the defence of the Glen Boy Scouts.

'Or us,' says Stuart, 'I learnt that from dad –he can whistle even longer and louder than I can. The Scouts are teaching us how to grow vegetables so we can artichoke and beet the Huns.'

'Well I wish they'd leave the puns to the papers,' says Persis, tapping Stuart's nose, 'they make enough of a hash of it as it is, without starting you lot on it.'

'Come on,' says Nina, 'Hanlan's Point, we said, while it's still morning. If today goes on as it's begun it will be far too hot for an outing by noon.'

* * *

><p>They take a ball for Molly because Stuart can't be sure where his father keeps lures and doesn't like to look. He, Carl and Nina take it in turns to throw it to one another with Molly as 'monkey' between them. Persis runs skip-change along the side of the sea, courting the waves, their white-capped peaks dancing at her ankles. With one hand she reaches for the hem of her dress and gathers it up so that only half falls long and unhindered on the side of her travelling foot where it grows wet and heavy from water when she does not outstrip the waves.<p>

'You must be mad, completely mad,' says Carl, coming away from the others and walking down to the edge of the water where Persis is wading.

'Isn't it freezing this time of year?'

'It's not so cold as all that. Nothing is cold when you've spent Victoria Day long weekend swimming in Lake Huron.'

She lets go the hem of her dress so that it falls evenly to her ankles and easily steps out of and away from the water, a veritable Rusalka in all her splendour.

'I thought you Island people were often down by the water,' she says, and there is laughter in her voice. In truth the water had been cold at first; it had it had reddened her toes and made them curl inwards on themselves, and whitened the tops of her feet until they grew used to the chill, but so used to it now are they become that the warmth of the sand –which is not much on an October morning–comes as a shock to her.

'Yes,' says Carl, 'but not this time of year. The sea breeze is sharp in autumn-time. It's a season meant for harvest and apple-picking and log fires properly, don't you think?'

Carl holds out his hands to her and she comes lightly out of the way of the waves to where he is standing.

'Having only known this part of the country in autumn, and that only slightly, I couldn't hope to tell you,' says Persis.

* * *

><p>On the sand dunes, Stuart and Nina sit talking too, she with half an eye on the others, he absentmindedly watching the dog, who is contentedly rooting among the dune grasses.<p>

'Do you understand the code they're talking in?' Stuart asks. He is sorting shells into groups; the cockles segregated from the conches and the conches from the cones.

'It is a bit like that, isn't it,' says Nina, handing him a scallop by way of apology.

'You mean you don't understand either?'

'Well –it's like any code. You want a key for it.'

'I see,' says Stuart. He sets the scallop down carefully in isolation. On the shores of lake Ontario they are hard come by.

'Will you teach me the Cavalier now?'

'Which Cavalier? I should have thought you'd had enough of soldiers,' says Nina.

'Oh no, I'm going to go off and become one just as soon as I get the chance.'

'Oh Stuart! Don't,' Nina almost pleads; he is so young-looking that she cannot bear the idea of his also going overseas, perhaps to become mangled, or loose his voice to the mustard gas.

''Course,' Stuart rushes to reassure her, 'it's an awful long time before I turn eighteen. Six whole years, and I guess everything'll be over by then. Besides, I only meant the song you'd been singing earlier. You said there was a part for me to sing.'

'Oh that, yes I suppose I could. Though really I think you might be better singing something higher –there's a perfectly good young lover. I thought it was hearts you were set on breaking?'

'_Please_,' pleads Stuart, turning the full force of his sun-brightened eyes on Nina. 'Teach me the Cavalier. It has such a jolly tune.'

'All right, all right, but don't blame me if your Molly runs off. I've never met an animal yet with a taste for my high notes.'

Molly does not bolt; she snuffles at the dune grass and noses the shells Stuart has amassed. She remembers Nina's singing from Peggy's Branksome days and the afternoons the girls spent visiting at South Drive. Besides, even top A is not so loud as a gun going off. Stuart and Nina pass a pleasant three-quarters of an hour unravelling the intricacies of 'Cavalier' until the others return to find them.

'Have we been making a scene?' Nina asks mildly.

'Not at all,' says Persis, 'though you've gotten over your worry about the words to that song rather quickly.'

'I told you earlier,' says Nina, 'there's very little I wouldn't do for Stuart. I wonder you could hear the words, walking by the water.'

'If you had the sense of a goose,' Persis tells her, 'you wouldn't let him know as much –and we weren't so far away as all that.'

Nina laughs leaves off teasing. Beside her, Stuart thrusts his shoulders back with pride. Nina's arm is still draped across his shoulder and he glories in the inclusivity of it; had the gesture come from Persis it would be protective, he knows. From Nina though, the action is unifying, _he is one of mine_ it says, marking him out as a citizen of that sparsely populated musical universe that is hers.

'I suppose you've come to say we've got to get back,' Stuart says with dismay.

'I have, even if you haven't,' says Carl, 'they want us all parading abut before going tomorrow.'

'Oh –are you going?' Stuart turns round eyes on Carl and then Persis.

'Where to?' Persis asks with assumed neutrality.

'Yes, where,' echoes Stuart.

'Never mind about that,' says Nina, rising and pulling Stuart with her. 'I don't suppose we're meant to know anyway. Come along you,' and she begins to walk back towards the harbour front and the trams.

'And call Molly back. We mustn't leave her.'

'Nina's not at all the way she sounds when she sings,' says Carl, taking Persis's arm and following along behind the others.

'She's much more…'

'Grounded?' says Persis supplying the word he has been reaching for.

'That's always what Ken says too –she's remarkable in a crisis, and quite as adept at singing Queen of the Night as she is at playing the silently suffering virgin. Are you really going tomorrow?'

'Yes –it was why I called when I did. I didn't know what the evening would look like –I was worried it might be full, and I didn't like to go and not say anything.'

'No, of course.' She wants, more than anything, to cry out as Nina's Rusalka once cried to the moon, _do not go_, but does not. It hardly seems right, not when she let Ken go at Union Station without a murmur of protest. But then Ken had promised he wouldn't be killed…

'You will take care, won't you?' Persis says.

'Of course.'

'That's all right then,' and drawing her arm from his Persis runs to catch the others up.

* * *

><p>*A vilja (or vilia) is a wood-nymph.<p>

**Lyrics to 'Hallo Maiden See Him Ride', or 'the Cavalier' from Lehar's _Merry Widow_, translated first in 1905


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